I swear the UFO is coming any minute

Posted by Ariarule 3 hours ago

I swear the UFO is coming any minute(www.experimental-history.com)

86 points | 16 comments

bigbuppo 22 minutes ago|

One of the more recent "the UFO is coming" events were those people that sold their houses and traveled around in RVs because they thought the rapture was happening on a specific date... or at least that was the message. Turns out most of them just sort of liked the idea of selling their houses and traveling around in RVs.

MarkusQ 2 hours ago||

Surprisingly many things seem to be spoiled by the "too many of the people being studied were actually other researchers trying to study the same thing" (or even more commonly, students being taught about the thing).

I suspect the ability to post/apply for jobs with AI "to study ___" has played a part in getting us into our present predicament. If only one researcher did it, the results would be negligible, but if a significant number try it, all those negligibles add up.

smsm42 35 minutes ago|

There's a common joke that defines psychology as the scientific discipline studying the undergraduate psychology students. That is obviously due to the fact that a lot of research subjects are found where it's easiest to find them - right on campus, and a lot of people who have time and desire to participate in studies (instead of, you know, working) are the students themselves.

nicbou 1 hour ago||

Experimental History is such a consistently pleasant read. It's one of the few publications I read religiously.

wildzzz 32 minutes ago||

For the DCA noise complaints, a household (probably the same one as 2015) submitted 19000 complaints in 2016. That's 52 times a day or 3-4 per waking hour.

pnw 37 minutes ago||

IDK how many people on HN have read When Prophecy Fails, but it's a seminal paper as I understand it. If you want a more contemporary and readable book on the same topic, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Cult by Diana Tumminia is very readable and covers the same ground.

Super interesting to see the original research challenged.

themafia 53 minutes ago||

> so what we remember is not exactly what we saw.

Yet there are savants with nearly perfect recall which has been tested multiple times. I strongly doubt there is a single model for memory or even a single mechanism for forming memories and as a result personal understandings of it poorly generalize across any random section of the population.

jacquesm 33 minutes ago||

> And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.

This goes for a lot of things that are utter bullshit. Lie detectors, handwriting, many others and the big bad bogeyman of the court: statistics.

Eyewitnesses being unreliable is one thing, but expert witnesses believing their own bs should be a liability if they are found to be wrong after the fact.

keyle 2 hours ago||

What is this supposed to be about? Looks like rambling of a man in his personal blog. Some context would help.

Why do people upvote this en-masse while actually interesting tech related blogs just fly by without a vote?

(genuinely trying to understand).

Are you all sitting on Discord channels, chilling each other's posts for karma points?

judah 1 hour ago||

I upvoted it after reading it. I thought there were a number of amusing, counter-intuitive studies in the post. Worth the read.

dcminter 1 hour ago||

Same; I liked it so much I added it to my rss feed reader so I don't miss future posts.

dooglius 53 minutes ago|||

Explained in the very first sentence, "This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a selection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months."

EA-3167 1 hour ago|||

My first reflexive thought, and I suspect possibly yours too, was "Oh wow it's the same pattern I've seen here for years every time the new get-rich-quick career path drops!" Remember when people would look you dead in the eye and swear to God that you'd have your OS "running on the chain" and PoW would solve the energy hogging problems of crypto? It would be the new money, goodbye fiat, everything would change!

Well a lot of the same players are cashing in on AI, but I'm sure the UFO will show up any day now.

hard_times 1 hour ago||

I wholeheartedly agree. Doesn't look organic at all. Guess it's the quality of Hacker News these days: blog spam.

bigbuppo 36 minutes ago||

Wait until you find out most of the comments are shitposts.

jongjong 1 hour ago|

You can never know if/when an unraveling event will occur.

A problem may be real but you can't know what the resolution will be or when it will come, if ever. The problem (or feeling of doom or whatever) could disappear on its own without even being acknowledged. Also, you could have identified a valid symptom but not the root cause. You could die before the problem is acknowledged by others. The problem could just affect you and people like you and not be universal.

A related concept in economics is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

If you think a UFO is coming to destroy you, you might be vaguely right in a metaphorical sense that a complex system (or some mysterious adversary) is coming to crush you and your tribe in the next few years due to mysterious reasons though it's not going to be a literal UFO, it may feel like a UFO because you can't fully explain the approaching force but you can feel it intensifying. Without sufficient info and intelligence, the mind will try to transform complex problems that it cannot fully grasp into simple concepts that it can understand and that you can react to and communicate with your tribe (that they can also understand).

A UFO may be a metaphor for a powerful, mysterious, hidden adversary whose capabilities you do not understand. In any case, the correct response is to prepare, hide and flee.